ArtSeen
Stephanie Campos, Lady Shadow: Grid Machine
Anna Kustera March 8 – April 14, 2007
The eight paintings in Stephanie Campos’ solo debut at Anna Kustera are at once rough and tumble objects and elegant meditations on modernism’s romance with the sublimity of the square.
The paintings are modest in scale, with the exception of the show’s centerpiece, “Organize Freedom” (2006-2007, 96×84 inches), and painted on masonite, wood, and paper. Campos’ Suprematist palette of white, black and red, and her rejection of canvas contribute to an off-beat vision that mixes a rock & roll sensibility with a poetic appraisal of painted surfaces. The purity of Malevich’s white squares are thickened with oil, scraped with a palette knife, and outlined by ivory blacks and cadmium reds.

In “Grid Machine” (2007), black and red squares of various sizes and densities compete with lines and edges for dominance of the white space. It’s as if the painting is in process before our eyes, squares breaking down and re-forming, merging into the white, or popping out as thick as a relief. “Before, After, Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow” (2007), leans against the gallery wall; a layer of creamy white paint covers half of its surface and gathers in a little dried pool at the foot of the painting. The time-based action of painting a painting, the before and after of a critical moment in the studio, is transferred to the gallery space, an act that feels more like a heartfelt attempt at explicating a painter’s process than a subversive gag.
It is to Campos’ credit that she refuses to fall back on recycling her painter’s lexicon; instead she engages with a studied experimentation within a coherent vision. Each painting included in this show is a singular testament to the formal possibilities of three colors and the impassioned manipulation of geometry. Abstraction’s twin impulse toward the sacred and profane is readily grappled with in paintings that retain the urban mysticism of the unintentional collage of a subway station wall. In “Hidden Place” (2007), red and black squares merge into shades of pink and gray, disintegrating into an unreadable map of tile-like pieces. Just as Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” is an ordered translation of the kinetic energy of mid-century New York City, Campos’ most successful works are attempts to delineate space and order from chaos. “Cross” (2007) with its red squares haphazardly arranged to describe a barely perceptible cross against a glossy black background, could be an ode to the neon pattern glimpsed at night from a high-rise window.
In “Portrait (Haunted II)” (2007), a “face” composed of white splatter-paint eyes and a red rectangle mouth emerges from a dense blackness. Like the late painting of Philip Guston, it is deceptively cartoon-like, both funny and tragic, light and heavy. Is it a quirky anomaly in an abstract painting show, or a reference to the collapsibility of abstraction and representation that occurs in all “abstract” art? In a critique of the Museum of Modern Art’s crowd-pleaser, Comic Abstraction, Peter Schjeldahl posed the question, “Has abstraction, since the sixties, fallen from grace, or been liberated from preciousness?” The paintings of this talented young artist provide an answer.
—Nora Griffin
Stephanie Campos’ paintings can be seen at Abaton Garage art gallery, May 6-June 1
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
47. (Madison Square Park)
By Raphael RubinsteinAPRIL 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist transports several dozen dead or dying Atlantic white cedar trees from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to Madison Square Park in Manhattan.

Yuji Agematsu: Times Square Times (Kodak All-Stars)
By Peter BrockDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
The orgy of artificial light and advertising causes most visitors to tilt their heads skyward as they drift through Times Square. Despite, or perhaps because of this maximalist effort above our heads, Yuji Agematsu remains attuned to the peripheral drama unfolding at street level. Over the course of four years during the mid-2000s, the artist took hundreds of 35mm photographs during nightly walks through Midtown Manhattans most exalted intersection. The resulting images form the basis of his third solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery.
32. (A six-story building on Cooper Square)
By Raphael RubinsteinDEC 20-JAN 21 | The Miraculous
The year this painter and his wife, who is also a painter, move into their Cooper Square loft, he is hired by an art school in Philadelphia. Unwilling to leave New York, he spends part of the week teaching in Philadelphia and the rest of his time painting in his studio. He realizes early on that it is going to take him a long time to get his work to where he wants it to be.
15. (East Village, Union Square)
By Raphael RubinsteinJUL-AUG 2020 | The Miraculous
At 2:50 AM on a September night in 1983 a 25-year-old artist is arrested by NYPD Transit Police for writing graffiti in the First Avenue station of the L Train. When police officers bring him, bound at the ankles and with an elastic strap running hog-tie-style from his hands to his feet, into the Union Square Police Station they decide that he is mentally disturbed and must be transferred to Bellevue Hospital.